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Homeless women find recipe for independence at Scadding Court

After a homeless woman arrived with a crock pot and started cooking in the lobby, Scadding Court started a regular women's cooking program.

Rahma Idriss spreads tomato sauce on a pizza during a cooking program at Scadding Court Community Centre. The program allows for women from the shelter across the street to cook and eat together on Tuesdays. (TARA WALTON / TORONTO STAR)

Course instructor Krista Fry and 5-year-old Josiah Bailey add toppings to a pizza during a cooking program at Scadding Court Community Centre. The program allows for women from the shelter across the street to cook and eat together on Tuesdays. (TARA WALTON / TORONTO STAR)

Eight women and one little boy gathered in the basement kitchen of Scadding Court Community Centre to make Tisa George-Ouellet pizza.

Most, like George-Ouellet, are homeless. They live in shelters — specifically the big women’s shelter nearby.

You can’t cook in a shelter. The food is cooked for you and you are lucky to be getting food at all.

But George-Ouellet’s passion is cooking, and it was her 26th birthday. She wanted to bake a pizza and she brought her little brother Josiah along for the celebration.

So we tied on aprons, poured cups of herbal tea and started chopping garlic and green peppers and broccoli on the big wooden table in the centre of the room.

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“There’s no flavour in the food there. And it’s always the same thing every week,” George-Ouellet said.

I’ve visited many shelters as a journalist, thankfully never as a client. While I’m grateful they exist, it’s not hard to conjure a list of grievances: the noise, the smell, the fear, the crowded rooms, the unrelenting company. But the food? I’d never considered it.

Neither had the staff at Scadding Court, near Bathurst and Dundas Sts., until a resident of the nearby shelter plugged a slow cooker into an outlet near the reception one day, and set about making her lunch.

It was nothing fancy — just some potatoes and greens, a piece of salmon.

“She just wanted to control a portion of what she was putting into her body,” said Krista Fry, who runs Scadding Court’s community kitchen program.

Cooking for yourself is a basic act of autonomy, particularly when your life has spiralled out of control.

Once they got over their initial fears around health rules and safety risks, the staff at Scadding Court started to wonder: how many other women in that shelter want to cook for themselves?

At least eight, it turns out. So, they launched the Tuesday women’s cooking group, and figured they’d find the money to pay for it. (They did: the Women’s Residence is footing the bill.) That’s one more reason I love Scadding Court. The staff here ignore the city’s endemic red tape. They always say yes.

Every week now, one woman comes to the kitchen with a treasured recipe, scratched down from memory. Together, they’ve made Chinese dumplings and a Jamaican stir-fry. Last week, the whole centre was dining on borscht from this kitchen.

“I will show you how to make baklava,” offered Rahma Idriss, as we sprinkled the mushrooms and mozzarella.

This is what we women do. We hang out in the kitchen and cook together. We make our beloved chicken soup when neighbours are sick and invite them over for dinner. It’s how we nurture and share — whether we have homes or not.

Fry slipped the pizzas into the oven. Her life story is not that different from the women around the table. She was a single mother of four, living off welfare and food banks, after two slipped discs ended her landscaping career. When Scadding Court opened its community garden, she got a plot and worked with the other women gardeners, bartering landscape advice and gardening tips for child care. The centre’s director noticed her talents and gave her a job. Just like that, her life changed.

“Poverty can happen to you. All it takes is one kind of accident and there you go — your house burns down, you lose your job, your husband dies and leaves you nothing,” Fry said. “It can happen to anybody.”

For George-Ouellet, it was a brutal gang rape five years ago. She was staying in a friend’s apartment in Regent Park, when three men broke in and attacked her. She escaped out a window and down the fire escape, running to a corner store before she passed out.

“I still have dreams about it. It will never go away. I just have to overcome it,” she said.

Cooking gives her more than control. It offers comfort.

The pizza, when it emerged, was crisp and gooey. We pulled up stools and dug in. Perfection.

Catherine Porter’s column usually appears on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. She can be reached at cporter@thestar.ca

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